One Is the Loneliest Number

In 2012, "not" became the new relationship normal: not married, not a parent, not a close friend, not a loyal customer, not a committed employee, not a Democrat nor Republican, and not religiously affiliated.

This flight from relationship reflects a society that speaks in the poetry of relationships -- home, family, friends, community, colleagues, customers, fellow citizens and even brothers and sisters in faith -- but increasingly lives in the prose of divorce, single-parent families, transient community, alienated employees and customers, partisan political discourse and religious divisiveness.

Our relational unraveling has accelerated across home, work, politics and faith. For the first time, more than 50 percent of children born to parents' under age 30 will be to unwed mothers -- with a poverty rate five times their married counterparts.

The number of those with close, go-to friends has dropped by a third and those with "none" has tripled in the past 20 years.

Eighty-six percent of consumers say they distrust corporations more than they did five years ago, and customer defection rates corroborate that.

A MetLife survey found one-third of workers planned to leave their current employer by year-end.

Defection from political parties doubled the past 50 years, and now 44 percent call themselves independent, up 8 percent since 2008.

Flight from religious affiliation has jumped from 15 percent five years ago to 20 percent now.

It is time for the social scientists, business experts, political scientists and theologians to step outside their silos and connect the dots: Relationships across our society are trending negative at an alarming rate. Democracy, capitalism, communities, businesses, faith-based organizations and family systems cannot withstand the cumulative destruction of this seismic shift.

So, how are we to restore productive relationships? I suggest three steps.

First we must be brutally honest about the relational trend and its impact. We are losing ground in relational satisfaction, trust, loyalty and retention -- at a cost that is not sustainable. We cannot build the lives we want or the society we need on the backs of disintegrating relationships.

Second, we must embrace relationships as our most valuable and value-creating resource. It is society's great safety net.

After all, we were built for relationships. Divorced men are six times and women 3.5 times as likely to suffer depression. Men with "bad" bosses are 20 percent to 40 percent more likely to have heart attacks, and those who return home to live alone are four times as likely to die from a second heart attack as their married counterparts. As John Ortberg has said, it is better to eat Twinkies together than broccoli alone.

Organizations scoring above the median in employee and customer engagement perform three times greater on a series of financial metrics. An analysis of Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For found they outperformed their counterparts by a factor of four over seven years. Relationships are the elemental source of social, emotional and economic value.

Third, we must understand the causes of our relational decline. No one intended 50 years ago to undermine relationships. Rather, powerful advancements have delivered unintended consequences that inadvertently demoted relationships. One of these advancements is technology.

Technology certainly connects us in wonderful ways, but it can also isolate us. We once worried that computers would start to act like humans; now, we worry that humans are acting like computers -- consumed with the speed, quantity and access of information. We can now get informed without interacting with humans -- by spying on Facebook, accessing new media and websites. The American Academy of Pediatrics has coined the term "Facebook depression" and the Menninger Clinic now calls "technology addiction" an official impulse disorder.

Worse is how technology is used to wound. Research has shown that, beyond a certain point, more information does not improve our discernment but only elevates confidence and, often, arrogance. People call up talk-radio, cable news and blogs that offer one-sided opinions and shouting matches that affirm feelings of superiority. It's strife, monetized.

Cyber-bullying and a vitriolic blogosphere are brutal. Our ability to respond immediately, broadly, emotionally and even anonymously feeds the rupture of relationships. The head of software development at my old company used to say, "Give a fool a faster tool, and what you get is a faster fool." The carnage of faster, more assured and better armed fools frays the very fabric of our society -- our relationships.

General Peter Pace, addressing sectarian violence at the height of the Iraq war said: "If the Iraqi people as a whole decided today that, in my words now, they love their children more than they hate their neighbor ... this could come to a quick conclusion." We, too, must decide to love what unites us more than we hate what divides us. It will require making relationships a much higher priority and a different form of leadership -- relational leadership that invites and engages in a way that builds productive relationships.

It is time for a new, new normal -- defined by what we are, rather than what we are "not."

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The author, a Dallas resident, is a noted writer, consultant and speaker on relationships. His most recent book is "This Land of Strangers: The Relationship Crisis That Imperils Home, Work, Politics and Faith." Visit www.RobertEHall.com.